Welcome back to Save State, where I got addicted to a fun AA turn-based RPG for the last couple weeks. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fit in nigh perfectly with my revisiting of console-style RPGs from the PS1 and PS2 eras, of late, as it features an incredible musical score, quite possibly one of the most depressing stories I’ve played of late, and a fun timed hits system to boost your damage and avoid taking hits from enemies, all of which are things that appeal to my primordial monkey brain.

And you can read our full GiN review of this excellent RPG right here, but spoiler alert, it got very good scores.

Expedition 33 opens in an incredibly novel way, as you take control of Gustave, a scientist by trade, as he goes to deliver a rose to his old flame, Sophie. As you meander through the streets of a fantasy Parisian city called Lumiere, you slowly learn about the world, and that this reunion with Sophie isn’t a happy one. A large creature known as the Paintress stands up, changes a number on a large monolith to 33, and anyone that age or older suddenly bursts into rose petals and disappears- a phenomenon known as the Gommage. Gustave, along with several other characters, embarks on an expedition the next day to reach the monolith to try and stop the Paintress for good, hopefully preventing any further erasure of the Lumieran people.

Throughout most of Expedition 33, the characters hard carry the story. Gustave has relatable personality quirks, always ready to throw out a pithy one liner while smirking at another member of the party. Lune, conversely, is very calculating and deliberate in recording information in the event the 33^rd expedition fails. Maelle is the youngest of the group by far, joining the expedition even though she’d have nine more years to live had she stayed back in Lumiere, but her peerless skill with a blade makes her a solid addition to the team. There are other characters who join you later, like the battle-hardened Sciel or the always humorous Monoco. They all make for an absolutely amazing player cast.

Ultimately, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a tale about loss, acceptance, and whether or not you’ll immerse yourself in a delusional fantasy or pull yourself back into a grim reality. Do you continue to indulge in a falsehood that torments someone’s very soul, or can you finally learn to let go, even if it hurts? Its story is incredibly thoughtful, and in my opinion, they tried a few extremely brave plot twists that pay off very well by the time the credits roll.

Beyond the story of Expedition 33, there also lies a whole host of customization options that gives players tons of choices in terms of how they jump into combat. Very, very early on you’re going to be completely swamped with items called Pictos, which grant stat points to your characters as well as a unique passive feature. Each character can change their weapon, which also have up to three passive abilities and equip three Pictos. After using a Picto in battle enough times, the ability on it will be learned and you can equip those skills on any character assuming you have enough Lumina points to use them.

There are a lot of proper nouns in the previous paragraph, and to extrapolate them simply, you learn skills off of equipment like you would in Final Fantasy IX (or many other titles), and you have a limited capacity for equipping skills. Early on in the game, you’ll have to be very choosy with what skills you can equip, but by the end of it you’ll have hundreds of Lumina points on each character to have tons of broken skills activated at once- and you’ll need them, especially if you decide to fight the super bosses that exist in the game’s final act.

Combat in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is turn-based, but it’s probably more involved than you would have assumed at first glance. Each player character has a gimmick of their own, such as Gustave building up lightning charges which can allow him to unleash a single, overwhelming attack to take out powerful foes. Lune, the second character to join your force after a ship landing gone wrong, wants to use her various elemental abilities to build up stains of those elements, which in turn can boost different elemental attacks when you use those next. In effect, using an ice attack will build up ice stains, and her next fire attack can consume those ice stains to greatly increase the damage of that attack.

Every single character gets their own gimmick like this, some more involved than others. If that sounds like too much to keep track of, that’s fine because as you play the title, most characters will have methods to control their individual mechanics and give you even greater control during combat. Lune, for example, gets a weapon where you can acquire stains without having to attack first, allowing her extremely powerful Mayhem skill to carry you for the entirety of the game’s second act. Every single weapon a character can acquire has three passive abilities that typically interact with them positively in combat. On top of this, every time your characters level up, you can acquire new skills to use in combat and can spend attribute points to increase your characters stats, allowing you to specialize your team however you like.

There are a lot of options when it comes to building an effective team in Expedition 33, and it feels incredible to deal thousands, maybe even millions of points in damage by combining the right weapons, skills, and Pictos on your characters. There are many, many ways to break Clair Obscur’s combat wide open, though how each player will do so is likely completely different from each other due to the sheer volume of customization options available for use. Some players may decide to stack so many buffs that you can defeat the super boss in a single shot, while others may opt for a more passive, defensive strategy where you can make your team nearly invincible. Of course, that’s for the extremely late part of the adventure, but as a fan of over-optimizing game systems to their limits and finding goofy synergies, Expedition 33 certainly had enough to appeal to my basest instincts.

Now, I’ve gone on at length about how you can build your characters, but how does combat actually function? Well, if you’ve ever played a turn-based RPG with timed hits, like Super Mario RPG, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, or Shadow Hearts, then you have a rough idea of how attacking in this game works. Many of the skills you can use against enemies will require you press the A button with correct timing to increase the damage that move deals. There is a setting you can enable to automatically succeed on your attacks, but Expedition 33 will also require you time your defensive options too, so I recommend not utilizing that option so you stay fully engaged with combat.

Enemy attacks in Expedition 33 will test your timing skills, and there’s no way to turn this off. You’ll need to either dodge enemy attacks by pressing the B button, or you can attempt a much tighter timed parry by pressing RB which can lead to a powerful counterattack if you successfully parry each hit. The window for a dodge feels at least 50% more generous than the one for parrying, so when encountering new enemies it’s fairly reasonable to try dodging attacks instead of parrying them until you feel confident enough to parry their moves. You can dodge repeatedly if you miss the proper timing, but parrying typically leaves you locked into an animation. Missed parries were responsible for least 90% of my characters’ deaths during my playthrough, easily.

Of course, many enemies have some sort of Dark Souls style roll catch nonsense where they stagger, delay, and fake you out to force you to parry early and then whack you in the face. As you progress, you’ll also need to jump over some attacks like when a monster makes the entire ground shake with a stomp. Gradient counters pop up around halfway through Expedition 33, introducing a swirling, slow motion effect you need to be cognizant of in order to combat monster attacks. The player is given a considerable amount of time to learn each individual mechanic, though it’s worth mentioning that end-game monsters and especially super bosses will utilize most or even all of these mechanics in the course of a single combo, but most of those end-game things are optional content and not required to just beat the title.

The visuals of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are also no slouch, as you’ll progress through a pretty wide variety of areas with different visual flair, but it’s really the soundtrack that brings this package together in an incredible way. Much of the music is melancholy, with beautifully performed French lyrics to really drive the inspirations home. There are even tracks used for boss fights that are operatic metal, complete with lyrics by Victor Borba, the same person who sang Bury the Light from Devil May Cry 5. The voice acting is also incredible with Maelle being voiced by Jennifer English (also known from Baldur’s Gate 3), and Gustave who is played by Charlie Cox.

It is worth mentioning that, when it comes to accessibility options, Clair Obscur is a bit of a mixed bag. There is no map or minimap once you’re in a dungeon area, which means you may miss side passages or dark corridors fairly regularly. There is some accessibility with the combat, since you can automate inputs for your own attacks as mentioned before, but since you can’t do that while defending it’s a bit less valuable. The good news is that you can build your characters to tank hits on the chin, so you don’t have to play “Sekiro: Parry or Die” like I did. I devoted all of my characters to offensive skills, no matter the drawbacks, causing instances where I would take upwards of 8,000 damage if I pressed the parry button 2 frames too early.

Playing on the lower difficulty makes dodge/parry windows larger, and no achievements seem to be locked by difficulty, and if you focus on defensive Pictos instead of damage, you can reduce damage from even the final boss down to just a couple hundred, allowing you to play Expedition 33 more like a standard RPG, if that’s what you’re aiming for.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, if you couldn’t tell. I found the story was great, if a little depressing, and the character customization allowed me to do goofy things in combat and see damage numbers in the millions pop up, which is always appealing. I enjoyed overcoming the various challenges it threw at me, and parrying a series of hard-hitting attacks was a constant source of dopamine throughout the entire adventure.

That being said, if your loved ones suddenly explode into a bunch of flower petals, it’s probably just a science experiment gone wrong, so don’t worry about it. See you again in two weeks!